Creating goodlooking presentations in a short amount of time is a pain. When it comes to creating presentations, the most popular tools have the most burdensome UI. This distracts the user from being able to focus on the story. Creating even a simple slide can take several unnecessary interactions. Editing the styling for the slide is cumbersome, as each slide must be edited manually. Why do we need such complex tools to create quick and simple presentations? Taking away the UI Text-only solutions for creating presentation slide decks without a UI are not new, but often require advanced code with......
read more

Matching a query string to a string to get a boolean answer whether it matches or not is a pain. Take for instance the following query, roughly matching each string related to an aviation disaster: (plane OR helicopter OR boeing) AND (crash OR fire OR accident). Parsing this sentence recursively, with each bracket and boolean AND/OR logic becomes a bug prone process. Introducing Boolean-parser This function converts a boolean query to a 2 dimensional array with all possibilities. This allows you to quickly and easily see what scenarios will equal true in a complex boolean conditional. This tool is great......
read more

A while ago I had this hobby project where we ordered a mechanical claw from ebay and
connected it to an Arduino to control it via websockets.
This in the end would allow a webcam to be connected, and make the claw to be
remotely controlled, with multiple cameras in the front, top of the claw and
sideways for a unique perspective.
read more

No Wifi Popup - Automatically connect to your hotel’s WiFi network. It sounds like a dream. I’m highly frustrated with wifi popups in hotels and cafes. Their problems are: Never open a pop-up to connect when you need them Don’t remember the data you entered (even though you checked ‘remember me’) You never know when you lost connection when using https, you just wait until the connection times out. They don’t work nicely when using an alternative DNS server. I quickly hacked a solution together as a proof of concept. They only tackle the first two problems. You edit the......
read more

My old programming mentor Pieter Scherpenhuijsen used to joke with me ‘if it was made after you were born, its probably not very good.” And that does usually hold true with hardware products. However, it’s the timeless things that have proven their quality against the test of time over and over again that truly interest me. Take for example the plethora of books that are well over a century old which still get referenced today. Sun Tzu’s The Art of War, for example, was written in 513 BCE. Heck, even Andy Grove’s High Output Management from the 80’s is still......
read more

This year at Owlin we connected our big data analytics to some of the
biggest corporations in Europe including KPMG, Deloitte, ING and many
other high-profile equity trading firms. Our team’s hard work was then awarded
by the top awards in the business like the Accenture Innovation Awards and
the Pioneers festival.
read more

Did you ever wonder how Owlin is able to gather articles from a number of languages and sort them by subject? This is made possible in part by a statistical language model developed by Owlin in cooperation with scientists from Stanford University and Edinburgh University. The 5.6 terabyte model, which brings natural language processing to a new level, is now the subject of a scientific article written by Owlin’s Bas van Ooyen with co-developers Christian Buck of the University of Edinburgh and Kenneth Heafield of Stanford University and presented last week at the Language Resources and Evaluation Conference in Reykjavik......
read more

Within a span of four days in July, Owlin again proved its value at
reporting time-sensitive financial information ahead of competitors.
July 29: The Owlin newsroom catches the ASML stock as it rises 1h26m ahead of
other Dutch news services.
July 30: The Owlin newsroom highlights an article explaining the trading
suspension of Corio seven hours before market opening.
July 31: Owlin subscribers received a profit warning from Adidas a full hour
before market opening. Other major wire services reported the news just minutes
before the market opened, or even later.
...
read more

AMSTERDAM - This year at The Next Web’s annual hackathon, my partner and I created a hack called Hashtagivist. Promoting hashtags for social justice on Twitter. Hashtagivist Hashtagivist stands for “Hashtag Activist” was inspired by the amazing work of Suey Park, Mikki Kendall, and other proponents for social change and equality on Twitter. There are so many of us that believe in equality, and want to lobby for social change, but either aren’t that well-versed with Twitter, or have trouble finding hashtag campaigns. For me, I’d always catch campaigns after-the-fact via a blog post, and think to myself, “Gee, I......
read more